Printing systems receive, process, and print incoming print jobs. Print jobs include data that describes the location and intensity of pels printed on the page, and print jobs may be received in specialized formats known as page description languages (PDLs). Elements of a print job encoded according to a PDL are translated into a rasterized format before they are printed.
Images within a print job are one of the elements of a print job that may be converted. Generally, conversion of an image to a format preferred by a print engine may be a processing-intensive process, as each pel in the image is converted by solving a conversion formula. Processing resources are often at a premium in a printing system, and converting large images on a pel-by-pel basis with a computationally intense conversion formula results in long rasterization times, which in turn reduces the speed at which the print job is printed. Therefore, users of printing systems wish to increase the processing speed for images within a PDL encoded print job.